Edsel

by Loren D. Estleman

  I hurried into some clothes and went down unshaven and -showered to accept Zed’s meaty hand, a gesture that had lost all significance for me more than a year since my private meeting with John Bugas. In the same movement he transferred the keys to my possession. They were shiny steel and attached to a plastic tag bearing the Ford logo.

  “Registration’s in the glove compartment,” he said. “We can transfer the plates after we get back.”

  “Back?”

  “Well, let’s take it for a spin. Make sure you like it. I’ll drive the Merc back to Dearborn. We can’t have our number-one Edsel salesman driving a two-year-old wreck all over town.” He laughed his booming laugh. “Didn’t that sound familiar? Seems to me I said something just like it at the end of our first conversation at the Glass House. Of course, it wasn’t the Glass House then. Hard to look at the old barn now and picture it as empty girders. A lot’s happened in three years. Incidentally, Hank’s considering a name change. No more Ford Administration Center. He wants to call it Ford World Headquarters. We’re planning plants in Germany and Japan, show ’em how to make cars instead of plastic hula girls.”

  “A lot’s happened,” I agreed.

  I had to kick tires and things. The trunk was big enough for the spare and a small piano. There was an acre of engine—410 cubic inches, actually, with an air cleaner the size of a charcoal grill—under a hood that opened in reverse, tilting forward from the windshield with the hinges up front. It was a design feature predicated on the theory that a faulty latch could cause the slipstream to lift a conventionally mounted hood at high speed, obstructing the driver’s vision and causing an accident. I had never heard of a thing like that happening, but mechanical duffer that I was I saw a hundred potential headaches for the garageman in the arrangement, most of the things that required regular maintenance being located near the front, where the clearance was zero. Every new model has its bugs.

  The green-and-white interior smelled like chewing gum. The Teletouch transmission buttons mounted in the steering-wheel hub, which cleverly didn’t rotate, took some getting used to—I kept reaching for a phantom shifting-cane—and the self-adjusting brakes seemed to have been adjusted with some other self in mind, snatching at the pavement before I was ready and catapulting both of us toward the dashboard at the first several red lights we came to, but the suspension was woven from clouds; I took deliberate aim at a pothole that had broken one of the Montclair’s shock-absorbers back in February and we might have run over a rubber hose for all the effect it had on us in the front seat.

  A row of chromed, pedal-shaped switches operated all four power windows from the driver’s side. After a bit of comedy I got the sequence figured out and hummed down the glass beside me to let in fresh air and compromise that Spearmint odor. I missed the aroma of virgin leather and oiled wood that accompanied the new cars of my youth. I located the speedometer and gas gauge and the radio controls, which included pushbuttons for calibrating my favorite stations and knobs for shunting the sound around the recessed speakers at each end of the dash and inside the rear window ledge. The pull-out light switch was on the left where it belonged, the stomp-button that operated the dimmer on the floor beside the brake. The windshield wipers worked, the washers squirted blue-green liquid at the glass without apparent prostate trouble, the cigar lighter popped out fifteen seconds after I punched it in and sizzled at the touch of a wettened finger. That had always been important to me, although I had never smoked. I could figure out the rest of the buttons and gauges later. Much later, as it turned out; the purpose of a tachometer still eludes me, yet I’ve never felt diminished by my ignorance.

  The big V-8 was almost silent when the car was rolling, a tribute to both its exhaust system and the soundproof insulation inside the hood and firewall. When the car was stopped I could feel the vibration of its three-hundred forty-five horses through the steering wheel, like the deep somnolent rumbling of a lion at rest. I’d driven more powerful vehicles, but none so modest about it.

  “Well, what’s the verdict?” asked Zed after we’d been cruising for ten minutes. I hadn’t been through some of those neighborhoods in years and hardly recognized them for the new construction. Here and there the tall peak of a 1920s clapboard or the complicated roofline of a turn-of-the-century Queen Anne poked above the ground-hugging tract miracles like a blue-veined nose at a sock hop.

  “It rides nice and smooth.”

  I left it at that. There were times since the talk with Bugas when I could carry on a normal conversation with the man who hired me, but it required more concentration than I could manage when I was driving. Afterward I always felt even guiltier than I knew he was. It was one thing to be a party to an attempted murder, another to behave in the presence of that party as if nothing were wrong. Somehow the extra remove from the crime in question had cast me in deeper shadow.

  “You should’ve ordered the convertible,” he said. “If any day was made to ride around with the top down, this is it”

  “Ragtops are for kids.” In fact I’d been planning to ask for one almost until the time I placed the order. All my life, the open car had represented a world of hand-rolled cigars, easily rolled women, winters in Miami, and hundred-dollar tips. Tom Mix had driven a white Auburn with curved horns on the radiator and the top down to make room for his ten-gallon hat, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard had roared off to their honeymoon in a red Bentley convertible, and James Dean had hurtled a black Porsche bareheaded off a desert road into the Milky Way of immortality, two years dead now and still climbing. It was something that, offered the opportunity, you didn’t even have to think about. But approaching my fifty-seventh birthday I was starting to have trouble keeping my head warm, even in summer. The choice was clear: Either drive everywhere with the top down and hat on, a visual oxymoron, or keep inventing answers for the same old question about leaving the roof up on a beautiful day. I put in for the hardtop; and sold yet another share in my own mortality.

  I was afraid the silence was turning moody. “How are the figures?” I asked.

  “A little slow, but I’m not worried about it. Some of the older dealers have been with us since the Tin Lizzie. The new paperwork was bound to bollix them up at first. Also it’s this damn recession. Things will pick up by Christmas.”

  “The new Fairlane’s doing well, I heard.”

  “Hank shouldn’t have let McNamara beef it up. I told him it would draw attention from the new division. It’s bad enough GM goosed up Pontiac, Olds, and Buick to meet us head on, but anyone could have foreseen that. More competition from the other side of our own building we didn’t need. So what does McNamara do when I call him on it? Slap a two-hundred-dollar price hike across the board, starting with Edsel. You’re driving a thirty-six-hundred-dollar automobile.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I think the son of a bitch is out to sink us, Connie. He told me himself we can’t expect to outsell his Ford. His Ford! But we’ll show him.”

  “Someone told me Drew Pearson’s going to write up the Edsel in his column,” I said hopefully.

  “Write it down, you mean. He told Winchell we ought to call it the Ethel, on account of the grille looking like the, uh, female sexual organ.”

  He blushed, saying it; and for some reason I thought of Janet Sherman. Despite his size and bluff appearance there was an almost womanish reticence about Zed that made him seem out of place in the men’s locker-room atmosphere of the Glass House. In fact the anatomical possibilities of the car’s front-end design had already made the rounds of the Ford Engineering Department, and it had been suggested that if the phallic taillights of the 1957 Cadillac were to back into an Edsel, the result in nine months would be the 1,400-pound Crosley.

  I’d thought of Janet Sherman when Zed brought up the reference because an office complex, even one as hermetically sealed as Ford’s, was a breeding ground for gossip, and it had been known there for some time that the two were pursuing a relationship beyond the professional. Whe
n the story reached me I had thought of warning her about him, but in the end I’d decided it would be a violation of John Bugas’s confidence, which I saw in animated form as a tiny version of its owner with the same disconcertingly mild and all-seeing eyes. It was a good excuse for not approaching Janet. I congratulated myself on it whenever I felt like being smug. I had several more excuses just as good, going back to the one I had used to run away from her and hide in my safe empty bachelor’s house.

  I refrained from reminding Zed about my early reservations concerning the Edsel’s grille. I had not, in truth, mentioned them in more than a year. It had begun to grow on me. I only hoped the car’s more obvious merits would capture and hold the consumers’ fickle affections long enough for it to grow on them as well.

  Something else had been absent for more than a year. As suddenly as the scrawny spectre of J. W. Pierpont had appeared in my life, it had just as suddenly left. I had neither seen nor heard from him since that night at the Bel-Air Drive-In when I had sicced him on Carlo Ballista in full view of God and Spencer Tracy. For months after that I had expected him to pop up any time. I was certain he’d come around after Anthony’s obituary ran in all three Detroit papers—SYNDICATE KINGPIN DIES WITH HIS BOOTS OFF, blared Hearst’s Times, characteristically mixing its gangster and cowboy metaphors while promoting the little street-level hood far above his station—and wondered from which corner he’d spring this time, giving me pause to contemplate the ingenuity of an aging private snooper in never using the same approach twice. But Tony Balls’s embalmed remains had been taking up space in the family plot at Sacred Heart Cemetery for six months and my days remained sans Pierpont. I had begun to ponder whether Bugas had outbid the UAW for his retainer, in spite of his insistence that I deal with the detective as I saw fit. In any case I’d never ask him about it. Quite apart from the fact that the old FBI bureau chief was not the kind of man who answered questions put to him by simpler cells in the corporate culture, the thought of raising the Devil by speaking his name kept me silent. I didn’t care to tempt fate.

  Zed looked at his big gold watch, bringing me up from the depths with the movement. “I guess we’d better get back. Hank is expecting us in his office at nine.”

  “Us?”

  “It’s fairly unprecedented. He doesn’t call many informal meetings at the store. It probably has something to do with Jack Reith.”

  Jack Reith, head of the Mercury Division and the man who had come back from Europe with his head full of daring new designs that would eventually come together in the E-car—the father, if ever there was one, of the Edsel—had resigned from Ford at the end of August, the loser in a three-year struggle with president Robert McNamara, the mildest-looking of the pale tigers Henry II had brought in during the Harry Bennett years, all of whom struck without snarling. Reith’s departure on the eve of his brainchild’s birth seemed to have caused no ripples at all in the company lagoon, a circumstance that chilled me to my shoes. Where do the peasants stand when the gods begin to fall?

  I wasn’t thinking of Reith just then, though. He wasn’t the reason for the meeting or I wouldn’t have been invited. I’d rather not know, Bugas had said, a little over a year ago. Not for another year, anyway. Until the Edsel’s off the proving ground. Why I had thought I would be spared the final act was one for Mr. Wizard.

  I remember nothing of the drive home to pick up the Mercury. I only came out of my thoughts when I stopped in the driveway, leaving the room for Zed to wheel the other car around the Edsel, and went inside to get the keys and clean up. My neighbor next door, a retired bus driver with a hearing aid, stopped raking leaves and cupped one hand around his mouth.

  “Hey, Meaner! Tell your car to cover up when it yawns. It’s spreading germs.”

  31

  NOT COUNTING CHANCE ENCOUNTERS at the elevators, I hadn’t seen God—for there is no sense in not stating it plainly, he held us all in his great enveloping paw—since August 27, when I’d persuaded brothers Henry, Benson, and William Clay to lay aside their family and business differences long enough to pose atop the front seat of a Citation convertible one week before the car was unveiled in showrooms. There was even less of a family resemblance among the siblings than there had been between Henry and his grandfather, and the three came off looking like young executives employed by the same company in positions that seldom had anything to do with one another.

  On Edsel Day, as part of the costliest christening since the Spanish Armada, one of the Indians in Israel Zed’s PR tribe took advantage of friendly negotiations to establish Ford plants in Japan and launched five thousand bottle rockets of Tokyo manufacture into the Michigan sky, which upon explosion rained down parachutes supporting inflated rubber Edsels nearly as large as the original. The stunt carried a price tag of forty-five thousand dollars and marked the debut of the Japanese-made car.

  In an unexpected departure from his imperial style, Henry met us at the door of his vast office, all whiskey fumes and aftershave and stultifying body heat, shook our hands in order of rank, and strode ahead of us to take charge of the bar, out from behind its demure panels for the occasion and stocked as well as any liquor store I had ever seen, which in Detroit was saying something. With three hours to go before noon, Zed accepted a double vodka and I took Scotch and soda as a prop. (Never plead problems of health to the man who holds your professional future in the file drawer of his desk.) Until Ford waved us toward the grouping of modern chrome-and-black-leather chairs that occupied the corner opposite the windows, I don’t think either of us was aware of the presence of John Bugas, seated with his legs crossed and a glass in one hand containing a clear liquid that might have been pure grain alcohol or plain water. He wore unadorned gray flannel to his master’s blue and his customary expression of quizzical good humor. I suppressed a faint shudder of fears confirmed and sat down.

  “John.” Zed took a seat. He seemed only mildly surprised to see him, an achievement. Bugas almost never took part in conferences, poking his bowsprit beak outside the circle of home, private office, and liquid luncheons only in times of crisis. It was generally assumed that whatever repercussions Reith’s leaving might have had were settled.

  Ford didn’t sit but leaned a forearm against the back of the chair left vacant for him and sipped from his glass; bourbon, if my nose could still be trusted. His big face was flushed. The effect was that of a debauched minister supporting himself on the pulpit. “Mead tells me you rounded up Crosby and Sinatra for The Edsel Show,” he told Zed. “Congratulations.”

  “Congratulate Connie. It was his idea.” Zed seemed relieved. So it was to be a butt-patting session after all.

  “We’re pre-empting Ed Sullivan October thirteenth,” I said, when the Chief looked at me. “Ed Krafve okayed the expenditure.” Krafve headed the Edsel division and had assumed some of Reith’s duties at Mercury.

  “Ed’s a good man. If the Edsel flies at all it will be his doing. And yours, of course,” Ford added, taking us both in with a pontifical swing of his basketball-size head.

  That if banged around the office for a long time, like a ricocheting bullet. Since I had joined the firm it had not been a word in the local lexicon. Zed noticed it too, flinching a little as if grazed. Ice cubes collided in his glass as he helped himself to a drink.

  Ford was still talking. “Jack, what was that break-even figure for the first year?”

  “Two hundred thousand units.” Bugas was watching Zed.

  “What about it, Izzy? Are we going to make it?”

  “No doubt about it, Hank,” Zed piped up. “Let me tell you what we’ve—”

  “Please don’t call me Hank. I’ve always hated it.” Ford spoke gently.

  “Oh—sure.” Confusion. “Connie and I are negotiating with NBC to buy a cowboy show, lock, stock, and gunbarrel, an old-fashioned sponsorship like on radio, every ad a spot for the Edsel. Chevrolet wants it too, but I’ve got an inside track with the producer. It’s a color western, imagine that, about t
his rancher and his three grown sons, good family stuff, only with plenty of shoot-ups for the action fan. It will be the best example of product identification since Lux Radio Theater.”

  I worked on keeping my jaw from dropping during this spurt. He was starting to sound like a huckster. It was Ford who brought it out, Ford and his habit of leaving silences into which people around him felt compelled to pour words. The quiet years in Henry I’s shadow had been excellent training ground. Zed, whose education during the same period had been filled with campaign rhetoric and the language of diplomacy, words embroidered around meanings, was completely unprepared for so passive an assault. He was literally burying himself with his mouth.

  Ford drank but didn’t speak until his cubes stopped clanking. “Well, you can leave all that with Connie. I’m sure he knows what to do.”

  “I—” Belatedly, Zed seemed to have recognized the peril in talking without thinking. He shut his mouth, leaned down to set his glass on the carpet, and straightened, resting his palms on his knees. “I don’t think I understand your meaning, Hank. Chief.”

  “I think you do. You’re not dense. If I thought you were I wouldn’t have hired you out from under the Dewey campaign in the first place. I have an aversion to deadwood, as Jack here can tell you. By the time that program airs, with or without Ford sponsorship, you won’t be here to see it. You’ll be home watching it in your living room. You’re out, Izzie.”